June 30, 2014

The glorious U.S. Supreme Court will issue its decision in the Hobby Lobby case this morning around 10am. SCOTUSblog will have live coverage.

Hard to call this one. I can see 5-4 for the Hobby Lobby, or 5-4, maybe even 6-3 for the other side. More likely, given the various issues, it will be some sort of split between the two parties.

Feel free to discuss this or any other SCOTUS case/issue (will Ginsburg retire this summer?). The opinion on the recess appointment case that was being discussed in another thread is here. Overall, that one seemed reasonable to me.

UPDATE: Hobby Lobby wins 5-4, although not without some qualification (it seems). Opinion will eventually be posted here.

June 29, 2014

I've already reviewed the short story nominees, so here are the novelettes (between 7,500 and 17,500 words). They are listed in the order in which I read them, so you can more easily play along at home.

June 27, 2014

So I think it's now clear to everybody except Dick Cheney that the Iraq War was a mistake, and the US effectively lost. It was all for nothing, or at least nothing good.

I protested the war when it was being launched, for reasons both moral (it's wrong!) and realistic (never get involved in a land war in Asia!). For all my realism, I didn't expect the war to go as poorly as it actually did -- because I assumed the US military would go in with, ya know, a plan for the post-war period.

I'm now starting to think that the lack of post-war planning wasn't specific to Iraq or the Bush Administration, but reflects pervasive problems in US military culture coming out of Vietnam and the Cold War.

June 25, 2014

As a former son of the Magnolia state, the fight between Cochran and McDaniel has been filling up my facebook news feed. If you've not heard, Democratic African-American voters basically pulled Thad's bacon out of the fire.

The evidence is in the maps and numbers. Turnout was up statewide compared with the June 3 primary in which McDaniel narrowly beat Cochran, but fell just shy of the 50 percent share necessary to avoid a runoff. But the spike in turnout tended to be the greatest in the state’s heavily black counties, as this graph by election-data guru Charles Franklin shows. As the New York Times's Nate Cohn notes, the county with the largest share of black voters in the entire country, tiny Jefferson County, saw its turnout jump 91 percent. In larger Hinds County, which Cochran won by fewer than 6,000 votes on June 3, turnout jumped so much that he won it by nearly 11,000 votes yesterday. As the NBC First Read crew put it, “In a race that Cochran won by 6,000 votes, that’s pretty much your ballgame there.”

There is some gnashing of teeth among Democrats, wondering why Mississippi African American Democratic voters didn't stay away and let McDaniel win, thereby allowing the GOP to implode and have a Democrat run. Well, given that the Democratic party never really made much of an effort to recruit plausible candidates, the possibility of a McDaniel election was a distinct possibility. In addition, I like the conclusion of this post:

Cochran will no doubt crow all the way to November about how Black voters appreciate his constituent service and reasonable policies. But clearly, many African American voters who cast ballots for Sen. Cochran felt strongly that McDaniel would be an even more reactionary opponent of their voting rights and reforms that produce jobs and educational opportunity.

It's an ambivalent outcome for Democrats. On the one hand, as Cohn notes, "Mr. Cochran's victory eliminates whatever slight chance Democrats would have had if Mr. McDaniel had been the Republican nominee. Mr. Cochran is all but assured of winning re-election in Mississippi, one of the most Republican states in the country."

On the other hand, a show of political strength by African American voters as a pivotal force in Mississippi is good news. It might embolden a stronger Black turnout in the future, if not in 2014. If it signals a new era of African American political upsurge in the south, it could set the stage for a blue wave in 2016.

I also love 'there's got to be a pony in here somewhere' comment by Haley Barbour:

“No doubt independents and Democrats helped put us over the top,” Mr. Barbour says in an e-mail. “And I am convinced many of those Democratic voters who voted for the first time in a Republican primary now see the GOP a little differently. A lot of them are quite conservative on many issues – it’s a fascinating development.”

TPM has articles about Beck and Palin's reaction as well as an excellent piece by Ed Kilgore about the Mississippi dynamicsFor my part, I am really going to enjoy when folks like Beck and Palin get labled as carpetbaggers and get run out of town on a rail. There's also Limbaugh's use of 'black Uncle Tom voters'. Pair that with Barbour's observation and you might understand why Cochran winning is actually a much better outcome than making the seat a D for a cycle or two.

Season 4 began last night, and I'll mostly be following it only by proxy, via recaps and gifsets, not by actually watching (spoilers are OK in comments). This highly unscientific poll at hollywoodlife.com suggests I am not alone:

Besides fanfic, discussing and thinking about various problems with Teen Wolf has taught me some things about the TV industry in general. Especially how little (ad-financed) TV actually care about telling a *story*, compared to having a series of not-necessarily-connected emotional scenes. Kind of like ads, in fact.

Edited: to give credit to specific fans for quoted material, with their permission.

June 21, 2014

The shenanigans surrounding the Hugo Awards Nominations this year inspired me to buy a voting membership, which includes ebook versions of most of the nominees. Here's the Short Story list in the order I read them, with links to online versions so you can play along at home:

Until I did this, I hadn't consciously realized how little pro short fiction I've read in the last 20 years, while I've been reading not just buckets but oceans of fan fiction. So I automatically read these short stories as though they're recommended fics from a fandom where I don't know the source.

Senior Japanese politicians have urged the Tokyo city government to "clean up its act" after an assemblywoman was subjected to sexist abuse during a debate on support for childrearing.

The incident drew criticism from across the political spectrum after unidentified male assembly members, all thought to belong to the conservative Liberal Democratic party (LDP), shouted abuse at Ayaka Shiomura as she questioned the city administration's commitment to helping pregnant women and young mothers, as Japan attempts to tackle its low birthrate.

One shouted: "You're the one who should get married as soon as possible." Another asked if she was able to have children, prompting laughter among other male councillors.

Colleagues of Shiomura, a 35-year-old member of the centre-right Your party, demanded that the hecklers be identified and punished. The LDP's Tokyo chapter did not deny the remarks were made but said there was insufficient evidence to punish individual councillors.

This WSJ interview with the assembly member harassed, Ayaka Shiomura, is worth a read.

It's really quite difficult for me to imagine the kind of lack of decorum (on the other hand, the behavior known as inemuri is much more common) My own feeling is that when you see this kind of crap that the Tokyo Assembly LDP party members serve up, it's a sign that things are changing and men like this are feeling like they need to assert themselves. At least I hope. Talk about this or whatever.

Many of my e-friends have been writing fanfiction set back in Steve Rogers' pre-super-serum period, and they're always looking for details of daily life back then -- especially about the daily life of poor people, which is rarely recorded from their own POV.

I realized I have a special resource: I can still ask my Dad! So I made a tumblr, A Hero Grows in Brooklyn, and have started to put up posts with his replies to people's questions.

I'm not going to re-post all the entries here because some of them are rather long, but here are links and excerpts:

June 15, 2014

Hate to pull you all away from something as world shattering as the IRS and their backup policies, but as I wrote last year, I went to Bishkek to do some teacher training and I'm headed back this year. Amazing country, and this article explains some of the fascinating undercurrents involved.

One thing that the article misses is the underlying layer of Turkic culture. Turkey would be definitely punching above its weight if one imagines it competing in the same division as Russia and China.

In addition, Kyrygz (the last time I was there, several people said the country's name was Kyrgyz, not Kyrgyzstan, in order to put some distance to the generally bad rep that any country with a -stan at the end has) was part of the Silk Road, and you can see the diversity of faces in the pics on the Wikipedia page of the people of Kyrgyz.

My looking at flight plans makes for an interesting lead in to other geopolitical problems. I was wondering how I will get to Bishkek, previously I took Air Astana from Seoul, but I was thinking about going through Istanbul and was wondering what things were like. wj points out that if the Kurds get their own nation, Turkey will benefit. While Turkey would certainly benefit if it didn't have to spend resources and attention on the Kurds, these two links (here and here), point to a realignment.

In the politics makes strange bedfellow category, Turkey seems to have been supporting the ISIS against the Kurds, or at least allowing foreign fighters to go into Iraq on the idea that they would keep the Kurds occupied, but having an actual Kurdish state that could work with Turkey could sort out Turkey's energy needs (as the first link points out, Kirkuk (recently taken as Iraq falls apart) has reserves of 10 billion barrels of oil) This link gives a good description of who's taking what, who is fighting who.

One wonders how Iran would view a Kurdish nation consisting of chunks of Syria and Iraq, though the Kurds are more of a known quantity compared with a Sunni group that was kicked out of Al Queda for being too vicious (ISIS). I also wonder how much the Kurds would demand from Turkish Kurdistan and how much the Turks would be willing to give up. Of course, I'm sure everyone has heard that Maliki requested the US provide drone strikes against the ISIL and this article.

“What is needed is a coordinated air and ground action consisting of both a heavy dose of precisely applied firepower and a sufficiently executed ground defensive,” Dubik said in an opinion piece published by The Washington Post. “The Iraqis are incapable of such action alone. The firepower will have to be delivered by United States and allied aircraft augmented by Iraqi assets.” Dubik, who commanded U.S. troops in Iraq in 2007 and 2008, also advocated sending U.S. military advisers to Iraq to coordinate air support and create capable Iraqi military units.

Plus ça change...

Anyone with more knowledge or interesting articles they have come across are welcome to wade in.

June 12, 2014

A Sunni militia has taken a very large chunk of northern Iraq, and is currently (as in now) approaching Baghdad. The Iraqi army apparently ran away.

The Sunnis appear to want to establish an Islamic state, and appear to be aligned with similar militias in Syria. This makes nobody in the neighborhood happy - not Turkey, not Iran, not Assad in Syria.

The Kurds appear to be staying out of it for the moment, even though some of the cities taken by the Sunnis - Mosul, Kirkuk - border Kurdish territory in the northeast.

Iraq may be on its way to breaking up into three nations, roughly along sectarian and ethnic lines - Kurds in the far northeast, Sunnis in the north and west, Shia in the south. With the Sunnis perhaps embracing an explicitly Islamic state.

From the Telegraph UK's live blog, Ayad Allawi advises against foreign intervention:

This will add fuel to the fire.

Really the problem is that nobody cares what happens to Iraq. It wasn't just a problem of removing a tyrant. It was clear that there were no policies for after the invasion of Iraq.

My advice to the international community as well as the regional community is that they should refrain from interfering. It's not a matter of again creating a big war in Iraq.

Depending on the definition of "big war", perhaps Allawi has a point. The conflicts that are manifesting themselves in Iraq now - the sectarian and ethnic divides between Kurd, Shia, and Sunni - have been baked into Iraq since it's inception.